The PPC Den: Amazon PPC Advertising Mastery

The Badger here.

Episode 407 of The PPC Den Podcast, featuring Scotty Peck of CrankTank.

Scotty needed a quieter basketball for his living room hoop. He asked Amazon's AI chat for the same size, only lighter. It found one. He bought it. He never opened the product page.

More shoppers buy this way now. If Alexa can't tell what your product does, you don't get the sale.

So Scotty tests his clients' listings the way a shopper would. Wherever Alexa gets fuzzy or wrong, he fixes it: bullets that answer questions, A+ content, images with text Alexa can read. No keyword stuffing.

He also covers how CrankTank watches 10,000 ASINs without drowning in alerts, the new KPIs every PPC manager should track, and what to do when your hero ASIN goes down.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 MEET CRANKTANK ➡️ https://cranktank.net

🦡 Highlights
00:00 - Intro and Nicolas Cage movie picks
02:30 - Stranded in Hawaii, managing accounts from the laundry line
04:50 - From climbing chalk bags to Amazon
06:02 - What it takes to manage 10,000 ASINs
06:41 - How many alerts is too many?
07:47 - The only alerts Scotty wants to see
08:07 - Using Amazon's AI chat to find products
09:05 - The "when the wife's home" basketball
11:10 - How to test your listing with Alexa
11:40 - When Alexa can't find your best feature
12:33 - Borrowing what works on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google
12:52 - Knowing what to ask: be your client's customer
14:35 - Why niche agencies find hidden efficiencies
15:21 - Mountain bike "tryouts" and crash-testing client gear
18:08 - First moves when AI search can't find you
19:05 - Images tell the story, even to AI
19:19 - The Amazon PPC role keeps growing
20:53 - When your hero ASIN goes down
21:31 - "Why were sales down?" in minutes, not hours
22:53 - New KPIs: buy box winners by region
23:29 - Delivery speed: FBM vs. FBA
24:05 - Tracking profit at the ASIN level
25:16 - Scotty's takeaway: plan for the hero going down
26:20 - Where to find Scotty

🦡 Resources & Links

🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/pricing-product-tour/

Find Michael Erickson Facchin, the human I work for. He talks about this stuff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-erickson-facchin/

Find Scotty and the CrankTank crew: https://cranktank.net

📚 Free Amazon Marketing Playbook: https://www.adbadger.com/amazon-ppc-checklist/
Newsletter: https://www.adbadger.com/newsletter/
Show notes: https://www.adbadger.com/podcast

Go ask Alexa about your best seller. Hopefully she knows who you are.

Badger out.

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Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
Guest Co-Host: Scotty Peck
Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

#AmazonPPC #AmazonAds #AmazonFBA

The Badger here.
Episode 406 of the PPC Den Podcast.

Two episodes ago I read your bulk files so you don't have to. This time I go hunting.

Mike used to chase wasted spend in a spreadsheet. Download, copy, paste, filter orders = 0, repeat. Now he types /badger waste and goes to get a coffee.

Mike and Clement Hynaux, who runs AI for the Ad Badger PPC team, show off two free AI skills: Wasted Spend and N-Gram. Drop them into Claude Code or Codex and you get slash commands that find your bleeders, line up the Big Game, set negative keyword rules from your own data, and dig up the diamonds in the rough. Put them on a schedule and the report waits for you.

Should AI run your account with nobody watching? Clement says you own the results. AI makes good people great and bad people worse.

🦡 GET THE SKILLS WHEN THEY DROP ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/newsletter/

🦡 Highlights
0:00 Adiós, spreadsheets. Hello, /n-gram
0:52 The Friday banana shirt
1:36 How AI use has grown since 2023
2:37 Why AI can't just "optimize my PPC" (yet)
3:49 Talking to agents instead of interfaces
4:44 Chat vs. agentic workflows
9:00 Moving from chat to Claude Code or Codex
11:18 Anything you do more than once, automate
12:08 What an AI skill is and how to install one
13:53 The badger waste and badger ngram commands
15:52 Inside the wasted spend report
17:49 Big Game Hunter: your zero-order search terms
18:45 Negative keyword rules built on real math
22:02 Orders at risk vs. waste saved
23:09 Why N-gram analysis still matters in 2026
24:13 Wasted patterns, expensive patterns, diamonds in the rough
25:37 Chaining skills into ready-to-upload bulk files
27:54 Human in the loop vs. full automation
29:49 Automation isn't the same thing as AI
31:13 AI makes good people great and bad people worse

🦡 Resources & Links
🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/pricing/
🦡 FREE BULK FILE AUDIT ➡️ https://sheets.adbadger.com
Mike on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-erickson-facchin/
Show notes: https://www.adbadger.com/podcast

Go hunt some waste. Badger out.

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Guest: Clement Hynaux
Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

#AmazonPPC #AmazonAds #AmazonFBA

The Badger here.
Episode 405 of the PPC Den Podcast.

It's 5:30 AM. Mike is asleep. I'm not.

Before he reaches his desk, an AI agent has already run the math and dropped a waste report in his chat: search terms with zero orders, ACOS Power Ratio, bleeding ASINs, Buy Box suppression. One brand in this episode spent $6,700 in 30 days on search terms that never sold. Nobody had to ask.

Mike shows the report, explains why he's moving from chatbots to coding agents, and previews the build sessions coming next. Plus something new: a rapid-fire Amazon news segment.

🦡 GET THE SKILLS WHEN THEY DROP ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/newsletter/

🦡 Highlights

0:00 The 5:30 AM autonomous operator
1:59 Meet Synapse: my daily Amazon waste report
3:00 ACOS Power Ratio and Buy Box suppression
4:50 The 10 levels of AI for Amazon
7:01 Why AI makes your to-do list longer, not shorter
7:43 Rapid-fire Amazon news
9:53 B2B delivery rule and the fake ACOS trap
11:03 Why your agent should work off-peak
11:45 RIP the monthly spreadsheet ritual
13:35 Chatbots don't hallucinate. They under-analyze.
14:27 From chatbots to coding agents
16:13 Start from the output, not the prompt
17:12 Laptop, Mac mini, or cloud VPS
18:02 Local models and data sovereignty
20:01 The data layer: scripts do the math, not the AI
21:13 What lands in my chat at 5:30 AM
23:17 Turning the report into ClickUp tasks
24:49 What's coming next: build sessions

🦡 Resources & Links

🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/pricing-product-tour/

• Find Michael Erickson Facchin, the human I work for. He talks about this stuff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-erickson-facchin/
• Watch the episode before this one, Free Amazon PPC Audit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVU2N5w3OJk
• Run a free audit on your bulk file: https://sheets.adbadger.com

📚 Free Amazon Marketing Playbook: https://www.adbadger.com/amazon-ppc-checklist/

• Newsletter: https://www.adbadger.com/newsletter/
• Show notes: https://www.adbadger.com/podcast

Go decide what you want your 5:30 AM agent to do. I'll already be up.

Badger out.

-

Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

#AmazonPPC #AmazonAds #AmazonFBA

The Badger here.
Episode 404 of the PPC Den Podcast.

Since 2018 Mike has been handing you spreadsheets. The bid calculator. The placement calculator. The n-gram sheet that took him eons to build. All of them needed you to copy, paste, and squint.

I retired the copy-and-paste. Go to sheets.adbadger.com, drop in your bulk file, and I dig through it right there in your browser. Add your business report and I'll line your ad numbers up against your organic ones too. It costs nothing. It stays free.

Every account starts at 100. Then I take points away. Most of them go to one thing: spend on search terms that never produced an order. Not at the keyword level. At the search term level, where the dirt actually is.

In this episode Mike walks through the whole audit, screen by screen, in the order he'd audit an account himself.

Reading bulk files is the most tedious job in Amazon advertising. I don't care. That's the job.

🦡 RUN YOUR FREE AUDIT ➡️ sheets.adbadger.com

🦡 Highlights

(0:00) Eight years of Ad Badger spreadsheets
(1:30) Why we retired the copy-and-paste
(2:12) How I score your account
(3:00) Search term level vs. keyword level
(3:51) Converting terms you haven't promoted yet
(4:47) Structure, budgets and placements
(5:40) Competitor ASINs worth targeting
(6:24) Share of spend vs. share of revenue
(7:22) Ghost impressions and bleeders
(8:19) Why any ACOS beats no sales
(9:22) N-gram analysis and negative keyword coverage
(10:12) AMC audiences and total ACOS by product

🦡 Resources & Links

• 🦡 Get Ad Badger
• Find Michael Erickson Facchin on LinkedIn, the human I work for. He talks about this stuff there.
• Watch Mike run this audit on a real account, on YouTube
• 📚 Free Amazon Marketing Playbook
• Newsletter
• Show notes

Go find out what your non-converting search terms cost you. Hopefully it's not too bad.

Badger out.

Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

Sean Stone of Spillover Commerce is back on The PPC Den, and this time he refused to tell Mike the topic in advance. No pre-show. No planning. Just one question: which billion-dollar e-commerce market has nine of its eleven biggest players missing from Amazon?

Mike guessed mattresses. It's telehealth.

🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/pricing/

🦡 Sean's agency, Spillover Commerce ➡️ https://www.spillovercommerce.com/

🦡 Show notes ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-education/the-billion-dollar-brands-leaving-amazon-search-wide-open-the-ppc-den-podcast/

From there Mike and Sean get into what this means for everyone else: why the best Amazon brands cut their bottom 5% of products every quarter, why 15% of Google searches have never been searched before, why "demand generation" is a scary phrase if all you do is demand capture, and how to turn Amazon into an acquisition channel with a product insert, a QR code and a Meta pixel.

Also in here: what telehealth brands could be selling on Amazon tomorrow, why continuous monitoring might be the next GLP-1, and Sean's new tagline, "Amazon demand starts elsewhere."

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

00:00 - Intro

01:28 - The billion-dollar market that isn't on Amazon

02:49 - It's telehealth: D2C brands with a prescriber

04:18 - The haves: Hims and Ro

05:39 - The have-nots: GLP-1 brands with nothing on Amazon

06:23 - Who ranks when you search "Weight Watchers"

07:17 - "They paid for a billboard and left it empty"

07:45 - A market growing 24.6% a year through 2034

09:05 - Bigger than GLP-1: peptides, wearables, longevity

10:40 - "GLP-1 supplement support": 30,000 searches from nothing

11:53 - Protein snacks: 4x the search volume in three years

12:40 - Fiber gummies and the hockey stick

13:38 - Brand name plus modifier searches

14:00 - The spillover effect, featuring Gronk

16:03 - Trend spotting as a business model

17:56 - Nature Made's GLP-1 Companion: 10K units a month

19:23 - Why clinging to your catalog hurts your PPC

21:13 - 15% of Google searches are brand new

22:20 - Cut your bottom 5% every quarter

24:22 - "Amazon demand starts elsewhere"

25:32 - Demand generation vs demand capture

28:34 - What telehealth brands could sell on Amazon tomorrow

29:57 - Continuous monitoring is the next GLP-1

30:24 - Amazon as an acquisition channel

31:13 - The product insert, QR code and Meta pixel play

31:40 - The one DSP use case Sean likes

34:36 - You can't be full funnel if you're only on Amazon

35:59 - Go talk to your customers

37:09 - A "generational bag fumble"

38:44 - Will Spillover become a health-focused agency?

39:42 - Niche till it hurts

41:59 - Where to find Sean

🦡 Resources & Links

- Find Michael Erickson Facchin - Ad Badger's CEO and soul, PPC whisperer, and your go-to guide through the wild world of Amazon advertising

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-erickson-facchin/

- How to Launch Meta Ads as an Amazon Seller [The PPC Den Podcast]

https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-education/how-to-launch-meta-ads-as-an-amazon-seller-the-ppc-den-podcast/

- 3 Unfair Advantages of the Top 1% of E-commerce Brands [The PPC Den Podcast]

https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-education/3-unfair-advantages-of-the-top-1-of-e-commerce-brands-the-ppc-den-podcast/

- Why Amazon Brands Are Starting to Use Meta Ads and Shopify [The PPC Den Podcast]

https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-education/why-amazon-brands-are-starting-to-use-meta-ads-and-shopify-the-ppc-den-podcast/

- Unlock our FREE comprehensive Amazon Marketing Playbook: https://www.adbadger.com/amazon-ppc-checklist/

- Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.adbadger.com/newsletter/

- Review all our show notes: https://www.adbadger.com/podcast

-

Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin

Guest Co-Host: Sean Stone

Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez

Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

Gonza Martinez is back on the PPC Den, and a lot has changed since his last visit seven months ago.

He used to be the guy in the ad console every single day. He even built his own bid calculator by binge-watching Ad Badger videos and reverse-engineering the math. (Yes, we're still a little emotional about this.)

Today? He doesn't touch it. The only reason he logs in is to pay invoices.

Gonza walks Mike through the whole ladder: hiring two guys with zero PPC experience, training them for a year, handing over campaigns one crumb at a time, then a year of watching without touching, until he admitted he was the slow part.

Plus: why he stopped launching for a full year, why 12 launches flopped and he's fine with it, why his best products were never going to work on Amazon (hint: the price tag), and how he learns a new channel by offering the best person alive money for an hour.

Also: why "hire an agency and go to the beach" is a lie, the question every brand should ask their agency, and what Yeti teaches us about knowing when to stop.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

00:53 — The bid calculator he built from old episodes
06:41 — "Why weren't results 10% better?"
09:05 — Elon, Twitter, and going past the mark
12:05 — The delegation formula says don't give up PPC
16:05 — Training Diego and Franco from total zero
17:21 — The slow handoff ladder (junk SKUs first)
18:47 — A full year of looking but not touching
19:46 — The day he stopped logging in
20:18 — Why agency-jumpers never learn anything
23:44 — The one question to ask your agency
26:01 — Big brands launch a lot and kill a lot
27:17 — The 80/20 flop rate is an Amazon thing
30:17 — The real reason the products failed: price
34:16 — "You're not Yeti in the car"
35:29 — Plan your launches around your MOQ
36:40 — Building your email list backwards from 1,500 units
38:39 — Learning Meta, Google, and email from scratch
39:13 — Pick a "true North"
40:30 — Offer the best person alive $2,500 for one hour
43:48 — "The more you read about parenting, the more you realize business was easy"

🦡 Resources & Links

• 🦡 GET AD BADGER
• Find Michael Erickson Facchin, Ad Badger's CEO
• Our guest: Gonza Martinez of Ziresquare
• Training PPC Managers Who Can Train Others
• How Can I Reach My Full Potential In The Amazon PPC Space?
• What's the Best Way to Manage an Amazon Brand?
• 📚 FREE Amazon Marketing Playbook
• Subscribe to our newsletter
• Review all our show notes

-

• Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
• Guest Co-Host: Gonza Martinez
• Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
• Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash
• Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

Five years ago you could hire a PPC manager for bids, budgets, keywords, campaign types and structure, and that was the whole job. Today Mike argues that a good Amazon PPC marketer is just a good Amazon marketer, and the job now reaches into what used to be somebody else's problem entirely: fees, refunds, logistics, and the one he thinks is most underrated, stock.

This is the case for letting your marketing team into your inventory data, and it starts with a client who flatly did not believe it mattered. Conversion rate is a product page problem and a PPC problem, they said. So Olena on the Ad Badger team built the chart that settled it - unit session percentage plotted against warehouse balance - and the split was uncomfortable. Above one threshold the numbers held. Below it they didn't. Sales, conversion rate, Buy Box. Not out of stock. Just low.

That sent Mike into inventory distortion - the combined financial drain of overstocking and stocking out, estimated to cost global retail 10 to 30% of total sales volume, and almost never mentioned alongside ACoS. He breaks the damage into four buckets: lost revenue that doesn't happen evenly (half a million Buy Box checks found roughly one in three products has at least one location with a suppressed Buy Box), rank decay, the PPC tax you pay while competitors take cheaper clicks, and capital locked up in overstock.

Then the SOP. Three reports - advertised products, FBA inventory health, and detailed page sales and traffic by ASIN - dropped into Claude with a prompt, and you have a dashboard. Mike walks an anonymized $400K a month account where roughly 30% of the catalog was fully out of stock and a couple of SKUs sat on over 1,000 days of supply. Plus the one nobody automates: nothing tells you when a product comes back in stock, which is exactly when you want the ads switched back on.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

• 00:00 - Intro
• 00:22 - What PPC management looked like five years ago
• 01:13 - Fees, refunds, logistics and stock: the new scope
• 01:44 - Lost revenue, rank decay, PPC tax and capital lockup
• 02:29 - The client who didn't believe it
• 03:07 - Unit session percentage vs warehouse balance
• 04:22 - Inventory distortion, and the 10 to 30%
• 05:36 - Problem 1: lost revenue, zip code by zip code
• 05:57 - What half a million Buy Box checks revealed
• 06:51 - Problems 2 and 3: rank decay and the PPC tax
• 07:28 - The SOP: three reports across two timeframes
• 09:03 - The case study: a $400K per month account
• 10:50 - Reading the dashboard: days of stock left
• 11:47 - The restocks nobody notifies you about
• 12:42 - A free zip code level Buy Box tool

🦡 Resources & Links

• 🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️
• Michael Erickson Facchin - Ad Badger's CEO
• You're Not Out of Stock, So Why Are Your Sales Down?
• Buy Box Checker - free zip code level Buy Box and stock tracking
• 📚 Unlock our FREE Amazon Marketing Playbook
• Subscribe to our newsletter
• Review all our show notes

Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

Today Mike is flying solo, and for once the case file is his own: 400 episodes of The PPC Den, and what a decade of these conversations actually taught him about who wins on Amazon and who just stays busy.

There's a shirt involved. There's a DSLR. There's also the small matter of being #1 on both of FeedSpot's Amazon podcast lists - the 9 Best Amazon PPC Podcasts and the 14 Best Amazon Advertising Podcasts - which raises the question of how those are two different lists. Mike rewinds eight years to the first two videos ever published, back when the bidding advice was revenue-per-click and the first episode of this show asked whether we were living in the golden age of Amazon PPC.

Then the part worth writing down. Across 400 episodes and ten years of running Ad Badger, four things keep showing up in the people who succeed: they're never distracted by nonsense, they know how to prioritize, they never stop chasing product-market fit, and they treat the job as one that keeps evolving. On the way through you'll hear why there are no silver bullets, only lead bullets, why the most successful accounts Mike has worked on were the ones he barely had to touch, and the line most sellers have backwards - great PPC cannot save bad product-market fit, and PPC is the thing that tells you whether you have it.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

• 00:00 - Intro: 400 episodes of The PPC Den
• 00:32 - The DSLR, the shirt, and the milestone
• 01:32 - Two FeedSpot lists, two #1 rankings
• 01:54 - The first two YouTube videos, eight years ago
• 02:31 - The very first episode: the golden age of Amazon PPC
• 03:44 - Lesson 1: never distracted by nonsense
• 04:15 - No silver bullets, only lead bullets
• 05:48 - Lesson 2: the skill of prioritization
• 05:58 - Why the job got more complicated, not less
• 07:04 - Lesson 3: the product-market fit nobody finishes
• 07:20 - The easiest campaigns, and why they were easy
• 08:16 - What PPC tells you about product-market fit
• 08:40 - Lesson 4: the evolving role of the PPC manager
• 09:06 - The stock level and PPC performance mashup
• 09:51 - The commitments for the next 100 episodes
• 10:58 - The weekly digest plan
• 11:19 - Every company is a software company
• 12:52 - What 400 episodes changed

🦡 Resources & Links

• 🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️
• Find Michael Erickson Facchin - Ad Badger's CEO and soul, PPC whisperer, and your go-to guide through the wild world of Amazon advertising
• How to Find Your Amazon Cross-Sales and True Organic Sales
• 📚 Unlock our FREE comprehensive Amazon Marketing Playbook
• Subscribe to our newsletter
• Transform your workflow with our comprehensive Amazon Advertising checklist
• Review all our show notes

Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

There is no shortage of AI hype for Amazon sellers. "AI bidding." "AI agents." Videos about tools that shipped this morning.

This is the opposite of that. Michael walks the full 10-level progression from clicking around in Seller Central to running autonomous, self-improving agents on your account and is honest about what each level actually costs you in time. Claws out.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

0:00 What's on Claws Out today
1:51 The problem with "AI bidding" content
2:11 AI is amazing and still a boatload of work
3:43 Bloom's Taxonomy: the framework to climb
5:06 ACT 1 Level 1: just the Amazon interface
6:04 What the interface is good and bad at
7:52 Don't automate anything until you have a mental model
8:45 Level 2: spreadsheets still a prerequisite?
9:38 Bulk files are the one file worth mastering
11:08 N-gram analysis on bulk files
11:50 ACT 2 Level 3: asking a raw LLM (the worst option)
12:16 The canoe problem: AI knows a lot, but it isn't wise
13:59 "My ACoS is high, what do I do?" where the nuance dies
14:58 Level 4: project-based LLMs and your knowledge base
16:14 Level 5: drop a spreadsheet into an LLM
17:56 Level 6: two data sources at once the magic starts
18:21 Maryna's stock-level dashboard
20:25 Level 7: coding agents (and why the line is blurring)
22:54 What a skill actually is
23:49 Level 8: read-only APIs and MCPs
24:52 Buy Box Checker MCP tools in action
26:59 No spreadsheets, no interface have AI build your own
28:19 Level 9: agentic workflows and the ad waste firewall
29:34 The catch: AI is not deterministic
30:32 Level 10: memory and the self-improvement cycle
31:38 Ad Badger now has its own MCP
32:20 Open-source skills and the Badger audit process
33:30 Your homework + see you in the Badger Den

🦡 Your Homework

1. Find your level on the ladder honestly. If you can't explain your budgeting protocol, keyword structure, and auto campaign strategy without opening a tool, you're at Level 1 stay there this week.
2. Get good at one bulk file. The legacy sponsored ads reports are being retired; bulk files are here to stay.
3. Connect the Ad Badger MCP wherever you already use AI and run a wasted spend audit.
4. Get on the Ad Badger email list weekly skill drops and walkthroughs are coming.

🦡 Resources & Links

🦡 Get Ad Badger
The N-Gram Analysis Tool
Amazon Ads Bulk Operations
Use AI & Spreadsheets to Prevent Stock-Outs📚 FREE Amazon Marketing Playbook
All show notes

-· Host: Michael Erickson Facchin

· Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez

· Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash

· Editor: Pedro Moreno

Today Mike is joined again by Steve Patenaude the closest thing this show has to a PPC detective to open a case that starts with a boring question and ends somewhere much more interesting: which of your products is actually earning the sale?

Amazon has retired the old sponsored product reports. The drag-and-drop builder that replaced them looks like extra homework, and it is but it also hands you two columns the old reports kept apart: the ASIN that was advertised, and the ASIN that was purchased. Put those side by side and the account stops looking like a list of products and starts looking like a set of relationships.

Steve found it while doing something ordinary. He was tightening up CM1, CM2 and CM3 to set targets product by product, and the numbers refused to sit still - cross-sales were everywhere, in an account with no parent-child variations at all. In the episode he and Mike build two reports out of that: one that shows what share of each ASIN's ad revenue was really a cross-sale (one product in the sample: 94%), and one that lands on a number almost nobody calculates correctly - true organic sales, business report revenue minus same-ASIN ad sales minus the sales that product picked up as somebody else's halo.

You'll also hear why total ACoS per product is usually wrong in both directions, what a 0% same-ASIN product is telling you, the loss-leader SKU trick that pulls shoppers onto a listing, and the stock-out that tanked a hero product's sales - except the hero product was never the one doing the work.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

• 00:00 – Intro with Steve Patenaude
• 02:50 – The end of the old sponsored product reports
• 03:43 – The new drag-and-drop report builder
• 04:29 – A client mystery: per-product profit targets
• 06:52 – One report for sponsored products, brands and display
• 07:22 – Advertised product ID vs converted product ID
• 07:59 – The most common total ACoS miscalculation
• 09:01 – The size of the halo without parent-child variations
• 09:31 – The non-hero ASIN driving the traffic
• 12:39 – A lookback window longer than 60 days
• 13:04 – Report 1: cross-sale share by advertised ASIN
• 14:42 – The reasons behind click A, buy B
• 15:48 – The cross-sale engineered on purpose
• 17:38 – The meaning of a 0% same-ASIN product
• 19:52 – The wrong way to read total ACoS per product
• 22:19 – Report 2: the true organic sales formula
• 23:16 – The share of product B's sales that PPC earned
• 27:04 – A rank drop misdiagnosed after a stock-out
• 28:26 – 100% organic vs 10% organic: the levers
• 30:09 – Three dashboards from the new reporting tool

🦡 Resources & Links

• 🦡 GET AD BADGER
• Find Michael Erickson Facchin — Ad Badger's CEO and soul, PPC whisperer, and your go-to guide through the wild world of Amazon advertising
• Our guest today is Steve Patenaude
• PPC Detectives: Solving Amazon's Most Mysterious Performance Crimes
• When Higher Total ACOS Means More Profit
• How to Audit Your Amazon PPC Account Using Bulk Files and Business Reports
• 📚 Unlock our FREE comprehensive Amazon Marketing Playbook
• Subscribe to our newsletter
• Transform your workflow with our comprehensive Amazon Advertising checklist
• Review all our show notes

-

Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
Guest Co-Host: Steve Patenaude
Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno